Social Media: Success in Realizing SM in the Business World

Do you have a Facebook account?  Are you allowed to surf over to a Social Media site at your office, or is your company blocking access?

Those are two questions asked recently to attendees at a Gartner conference on Collaboration and Content.  You’d think that the people attending a conference on Collaboration and the companies that sent them to that conference would tend to be strong advocates and practitioners of Social Media.  But surprisingly, only half of those answering the questions had a Facebook account and  70 percent said that their company blocks their attempts to access Social Media sites.  Companies are still slow in recognizing how Social Media can positively affect their businesses.  They’re hesitating in their adoption.

The best way to try something new is to crack the door open a bit and roll out a small pilot project.  That’s the approach that Forrester Research recommended for businesses that are thinking about how they could  get started with Social Media internally in their company.  Forrester Research offers up a number of suggestions of areas that companies can do to get their feet wet:

Collaboration.   Collaboration works especially well on projects of all sizes.  People can do things like communicate via IM, build out a wiki and share files.  Products especially like Microsoft SharePoint or Open Source Alfresco Share are especially good applications for this kind of group brainstorming project.

Internal Directory. Open a private Facebook-like application for people in the organization to share areas of their expertise.  Others can learn and coworkers with specific types of expertise can be quickly located.

Archiving. Share, classify, tag and comment on documents.   This helps makes the process of searching out information easier, and comments and ratings from others can guide you in finding just what you need.  Again, Alfresco Share and Microsoft SharePoint are good candidate applications for enabling this.

Support. Set up question/answer forums that can grow or be integrated with your current knowledge base.

Innovate. Let employees post videos for company suggestions.

Forrester advises a four step plan in implementing your strategy to bring Social Media use internal to your organization:

1. Communicate the plan to introduce Social Media techniques to the employees
2. Describe how employees will be able to participate and become social members of the plan
3. Determine how you will reward or encourage participation to ensure a success of the plan
4. Determine how you will empower employees to collaborate or create new content

There are risks involved with anything new.   But the risks of something going wrong need to be weighed against the risk of missed opportunities.  The risk that your competition is gaining on you by being more efficient and productive.  And the risk that you won’t be able to attract the top talent among the next generation of workers.